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Category: Mormonism (page 11 of 12)

HBO v LDS: ‘Big Love’ to show fragment of boring religious ceremony

13 March 2009 / / 6 Comments

Trouble brewing.

HBO’s Depiction Of Mormon Ceremony Upsets Church

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Is ‘Appalled’ at the TV Series

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is angry over an episode of HBO’s hit series “Big Love” that the church says is in “appallingly bad taste.”

An upcoming episode of “Big Love,” which chronicles the lives of a fictional polygamist family, is reported to be depicting an endowment ceremony, one of the most sacred rituals of the Mormon Church.

HBO has apologised.

“Obviously, it was not our intention to do anything disrespectful to the church, but to those who may be offended, we offer our sincere apology,” read the statement.

It’s one of those apologies like “Sorry you got mad” or “Sorry you’re so touchy.” Except in this case, it’s “Sorry, but we’re running the episode anyway.”

Does it seem strange that the LDS Church is objecting to people knowing the details of ceremonies which, according to them, contain the truly great things that all people need to know for salvation? Okay, that’s not really fair. They just want people to see the temple ceremony with the appropriate “context”, by which they mean the kind of context where you join the church and pay them lots of money over years and years. That kind of context.

Here’s the issue: the LDS Church has (don’t take this wrong) occult practices. I don’t mean ‘occult’ as in ‘satanic’ like people sometimes do. I mean ‘occult’ in an earlier sense: ‘occult’ meaning ‘hidden’. Many 19th century movements, religious and otherwise, taught that the really great truths were held in reserve for those who were initiated into the mysteries. The Masons and the Rosicrucians, the Gnostics and the Theosophists, all used this strategy. Joseph Smith plumped for it too in later years, for better or worse. But of course, secret knowledge has a way of getting leaked in the 21st century. How reasonable is it to expect the mysteries to stay hidden in the Information Age?

I understand the Mormons wanting to control their Endowment ceremony. After all, they wrote it. But it’s not reasonable to expect everyone else to share their concern.

God, Milk

24 February 2009 / / 2 Comments

We’re a day late on the Oscars thing in Australia, so I’m only just getting to the videos.

I was moved by the acceptance speech of Lance Black, who won Best Screenplay for Milk. He grew up in the Mormon church.

Here’s a transcript of the relevant bit, for those of you who can’t do video.

“I heard the story of Harvey Milk and it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life openly as who I am, and that one day I could even fall in love and get married.

“I want to thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to.

“But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you God does love you and that very soon I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.

Thank you and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk.”

I grew up as a straight kid in the Mormon church, and they gave us heaps of guilt just over playing with ourselves. I simply can’t imagine what he must have gone through as a gay teenager.

Black’s comments are laudable. If they make some gay person feel like they’re all right despite the attempts of religious bigots to convince them otherwise, then well done. Suicide averted. But there’s a bigger problem here: Black is trying to mitigate the effects of religions without challenging their authority. By taking god as a given, Black unwittingly gives tacit legitimacy to religions as potential sources of moral guidance. In fact, they have no more moral authority than anyone else, and most likely less because of their immoral actions.

It comes down to the whole God thing. Black somehow knows that this mysterious being ‘god’ loves gay people. How does he know that? Is it possible that god really disapproves of them, or perhaps even hates them? How does he know that God ‘gave’ us Harvey Milk? If Satan exists, why didn’t he give us Harvey Milk as a way of deceiving us and making us into homos? Does Black have some magical conduit to heavenly knowledge? If it’s possible to get revelations from a god, how do we know Black has the right idea, and not those nice men in suits that we see in General Conference?

I was re-reading this article again, an interview with Carol Lynn Pearson. She’s a Mormon poet, playwright, and actor. With her one-woman show, Mother Wove the Morning, she’s worked to bring Mother-in-Heaven out of the periphery of LDS doctrine. She’s also an advocate for gay Mormons.

It’s the question Carol Lynn Pearson hears just about every time she appears in public. She heard it again last weekend, during an audience discussion that followed a packed-house performance of her play “Facing East” at Theatre Rhinoceros.

How, one woman asked, could Pearson justify her own membership and involvement in the Mormon church?
…
Pearson, a slim, forthright woman of 67 who wears her silvery white hair jauntily short, nodded along as the question was posed. “I love the Mormon community,” she responded, “and I have a unique opportunity to build bridges.” A number of her church ward leaders, Pearson noted, had attended the opening of “Facing East” the night before. “They’ve been nothing but supportive,” she said. “I believe the Mormon heart is a good heart. I feel comfortable with my role in the Mormon church.“

That was before the LDS Church’s involvement in Proposition 8. I wonder if she still feels ‘comfortable’ being linked with a church that claims divine support for inequality and prejudice. Yes, she seems to do some good, but does she need to do this from inside the organisation? Is she not, in fact, attempting to help those who suffer, while providing a way for them to remain connected to the church that is dishing out the suffering?

There are two approaches you can take in this kind of conflict: reject religion, or attempt to transform religion into something less authoritarian.

The transformative approach is tempting, especially for religious liberals. You get to stay in The Bubble, where it’s comfortable (even though you take some knocks from the orthodox believers), and you get to imagine that someday… some beautiful day… your religion will change from conservative authoritarian to liberal democratic — perhaps even gay-friendly! And you can play a part in this magical process just by making occasional comments in Priesthood Meeting. And then the Millennium comes, and Jesus tells you that you were right all along, and everybody gets a pony.

Needless to say, I think the other approach — to reject religion — is the right one. We need to recognise that there probably isn’t a god, that religious organisations have no special authority to dictate the terms of morality, and that actions like Prop. 8 are signs of their all-too-human origins. This view has the benefit of being true.

I have this disturbing thought that keeps popping up: What if things had gone differently for me, my deconversion somehow hadn’t happened, and I was a believing Mormon in the middle of this Proposition 8 mess? Would it have been a deal-breaker for me? Would I have had the fortitude to recognise the signs of man-made prejudice? Would I have realised that it was time to get out? Or would I have kept making excuses for the Church, like some abused spouse? Would I have imagined things would change… eventually? (We let Blacks have the priesthood, after all! Well, black men.) Would I have fallen back on my old rationalisations: that the Lord is in control, but he allows his servants to make mistakes? Would I have privately disagreed with the Brethren, and fancied myself courageous for doing so?

I worry that, even confronted by an ugliness of this magnitude, I would have remained a liberal Mormon. Dependence on others for your opinion conditions you to be a coward, and I was very well-conditioned. And so I probably would have continued to give my time and my money to an organisation that was actively working against my values, and cared nothing for (in fact, actually disdained) the views of people like myself.

Now, outside the Church, I am free to speak out against injustice and duplicity without having to step carefully around ‘criticising the Brethren’. I get to live a moral, fulfilling life, without the moral conflict of trying to hold two opposing sets of opinions simultaneously.

The LDS Church will carry out actions like Prop. 8 whenever they wish, whether you are a member or not. But if they count you as a member, they do these things with your support. Something to think about.

Conversations with the Priest: My feelings are truer than your feelings

25 January 2009 / / 1 Comment

Latter-day Saints believe that their church is the Only True Church on the earth. That’s not such a drastic claim. Even though not every religion comes out and says it, most religions would say that their system (if not their own particular denomination) is true and all other are in some sense less true.

I was talking to The Priest about this, and I asked him, “Let’s say I told you that Apollo pulled the sun across the sky in a chariot. Would you accept my claim?”

He had to allow that he wouldn’t.

“Why not?” I asked. “On what basis would you reject my religion and accept yours? Or what about Muslims or Hindus with their claims?”

His answer was that he’d read and studied things, and the Holy Ghost had confirmed to him (via those wonderful feelings and experiences) that his religion was true.

“Well, they’ve read and studied, too!” I said. “And they have strong feelings that their religion is true. Are your feelings somehow more valid than theirs?”

There isn’t really a good answer to that, and to his credit he didn’t try to invent one. But imagine the cheek of taking that kind of approach!

When Mormons claim to have the One True Religion, they don’t really mean to be arrogant, truly. They sometimes allow that all religions have some truth (oh, what a generous admission), but they have more. Well, that would be all right, if they had better evidence than flimsy feelings, but they do not. So for churches that use emotions as evidence, that means that their proof is the intensity or the frequency or the persuasive power of the feelings they have. Other people in deadened and benighted religions may have spiritual feelings, sure, but they’re just not as real or powerful as their feelings. Their feelings just aren’t as valid.

That conversation was an eye-opener to me. I never realised how breathtakingly arrogant that view is, but it is. And it’s not exclusive to Mormons. It’s indulged in by every religious believer who says that their nebulous claims trump other people’s nebulous claims.

NB: The Priest is not a real person. He’s an amalgam of many religious people I’ve spoken with. I only write down a conversation with “the Priest” after I’ve heard the same claims from at least three different people. As a result, the dialogue is almost entirely made up, in order to make myself sound smart. Or it could be 100% accurate. I forget.

Proposition 8: Un-American?

24 January 2009 / / 1 Comment

Did Tom Hanks say something wrong when he called Mormon Prop 8 supporters ‘un-American’? Hanks has released a statement apologising for the remark, and while at first I wished he hadn’t, I find myself agreeing with his reasoning.

“Last week, I labeled members of the Mormon church who supported California’s Proposition 8 as ‘un-American,'” the actor said in a statement through his publicist. “I believe Proposition 8 is counter to the promise of our Constitution; it is codified discrimination.”

“But everyone has a right to vote their conscience; nothing could be more American,” the statement continues. “To say members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who contributed to Proposition 8 are ‘un-American’ creates more division when the time calls for respectful disagreement. No one should use ‘un-American’ lightly or in haste. I did. I should not have.”

Hanks strikes a nice balance in his remark. He reaffirms the wrongness of writing bigotry into law, but takes care to focus on the offending word. Prop 8 represents a form of bigotry which is indeed counter to values Americans like to claim, like equality, fair play, and so on. But leave the word ‘un-American’ back in the McCarthy days, where it belongs.

So I’ll say that Mormon supporters of Prop 8 are hateful, intolerant, unfair, mean-spirited, bigoted, and pathologically ignorant. Not un-American.

PS: Did anyone near you donate? It’s a matter of public record. Check it out on Prop 8 Maps. Name and shame, people.

Mormon Studies fellowship, but not where you’d guess

17 January 2009 / / Comments Off on Mormon Studies fellowship, but not where you’d guess

The University of Utah is offering a fellowship in Mormon Studies.

“It’s a matter of academic justice,” said Bob Goldberg, the center’s director. “There would not be a question if we were in New York City and wanted to establish a course in Jewish studies, or in Chicago, Baltimore or Boston and wanted to start a course in Catholic studies. This is a perfect place to do research on Mormonism. To me, it’s a no-brainer.”

The U.’s is the first such fellowship in the nation, but joins a growing list of colleges that offer some coursework in Mormon studies, including Claremont College in southern California, Utah State University, Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina, to name a few.

Sounds interesting, but what’s even more interesting is that you can’t do a degree in Mormon Studies in the one place you’d think you could: BYU.

Why not? Well, perhaps a few ideas. There’s a certain distrust of learning in the LDS Church, unless it’s specifically dedicated to meeting the needs of the organisation instead of, you know, facts. This suspicion was written into the Book of Mormon, and it’s worked its way into General Conference. Dallin Oaks, an LDS apostle, famously warned of the dangers of ‘symposia’ (meaning those clever Sunstone rascals). Here’s the money quote.

I have seen some persons attempt to understand or undertake to criticize the gospel or the Church by the method of reason alone, unaccompanied by the use or recognition of revelation. When reason is adopted as the only—or even the principal—method of judging the gospel, the outcome is predetermined.

He doesn’t say what the ‘outcome’ is, but it can’t be good. So Oaks is implying that trying to understand the Church using reason instead of — what? whisperings of a spirit being? some guy telling you? — will cause you to reject religious doctrine. An interesting admission, and a huge warning sign that you’re dealing with an enemy of reason.

Church leaders have periodically slagged off Mormons who research into the church’s history. One leader, Neal Maxwell, trivialised the scholarly efforts of thinking Latter-day Saints as “intellectual bungee jumping“. (A prominent Mormon apologetics institute was subsequently renamed in his honour.)

So it’s not likely that the LDS Church (via its official university) will make a place for scholarly Mormon research anytime soon. They don’t seem to think their faith can stand scrutiny, and with that I fully agree.

John Morley said it well:

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

Why abstinence doesn’t work

30 December 2008 / / 4 Comments

We already knew that abstinence doesn’t work, and virginity pledges are particularly ineffective. There’s a new study that bears out this result, but it highlights a new problem: kids who take virginity pledges are even less likely to use birth control and condoms. So abstinence education is not just useless, it’s worse than useless.

Why might this be? One idea going around:

Virginity pledgers may be less likely to use condoms and contraception because many abstinence programs cause participants to develop negative attitudes about their effectiveness.

Maybe program leaders are saying this, but I don’t think we need to resort to this idea to explain what’s going on. My experience as a horny teen in the Mormon Church has provided me with a hypothesis.

When you do something wrong, you need to pray for forgiveness from your sin, right? And Mormons regard sexual sin as particularly grievous. Consider:

• Mormons think that doing the horizontal mambo with anyone other than your husband or wife (or wives) is the worst thing you can do, second only to “the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost“.

Oh, wait. I knew there was something I forgot to do today.

I deny the Holy Ghost.

That’s better.

• An LDS General Authority (can’t find which one — someone help me here) told a story of his father seeing him off at the train station for a mission, and telling him that he’d rather the boy come back in a coffin than having had sex. And get this — my own father told me that story approvingly when I went off to BYU. He’d have preferred me dead than to have made a mistake. Then again, maybe I could have come home at the end of the year on a Greyhound Bus — alive — but in an actual coffin. It’d be a fun way to break the news.

But seriously, folks: this is a fact worth repeating. As with all authoritarian movements, Mormons hate sex. No, they don’t. They are willing to put up with sex, as long as it makes more little Mormons. Let’s just say that Mormons love sex, but they don’t like anyone else having any. Which makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you have sex, but repress everyone else from having any, there’s less competition for your genes.

Anyway, the main point here: Mormons regard unhallowed bonking as Very Serious. It involves prayer and contrition, as well as confession to The Bishop, which is very embarrassing because he’s just another guy in the community.

So Mormon youth, when faced with temptation, are unlikely to buy condoms or use birth control. That’s premeditated! That’s like planning to sin! How are you going to be forgiven from a sin you’ve been planning to do? What they do, since they’re Good Kids, is try to Be Good and abstain. But hormones being what they are, it frequently fails, and then you get pregnant teenagers.

(I don’t know if this line of thinking holds outside of Mormondom, but I bet it does. Non-Mormons: does this match your experience?)

The take-away here is that having stupid starting assumptions (a god wants you to abstain) leads to unwanted outcomes (riskier sex than normal). A better starting assumption would be: some kids are going to do it, and you can’t watch your kids 24 hours a day. Parents can encourage them to have sexual relations responsibly, if they must. Better to be immoral than to be immoral and pregnant.

Meeting one of my converts

26 December 2008 / / 6 Comments

I was an LDS missionary in the late 80s, spending two years of my life to promote superstition, magical thinking, and (worst of all) faith. The whole thing embarrasses me acutely now. I sometimes try and excuse myself; I was under the influence of well-meaning family and friends, born into a religious system that valued its own perpetuation. However, I’m pleased to say that out of all the people I taught and baptised, none is active.

Except one family. I remember them especially because of the numerous discussions we had. As a missionary, I always felt a bit paternal toward people I taught. I tried to explain things to them, convince them of church doctrine, and persuade them to accept, one by one, an ever-increasing cycle of commitments. The trick of this, I realise now, was that, once the investigator is more and more heavily invested in the Mormon Church with time, effort, and money, the more the sunk cost fallacy takes over and the harder it is for investigators to extricate themselves. You don’t believe in the Church? Then why are you doing all these things? And if they don’t get out, on the cycle goes.

I’d seen this family around church over the years, but just the other day I ran into the mom at the shopping centre. We chatted, and she asked how I was going with church. So I explained that I was no longer a member, and that I didn’t do religion anymore.

Some people have taken this with some equanimity, but not her. She was shaken. “Why not?” she asked.

Ordinarily, I’d tell someone the usual: I’d thought the whole thing was true, but eventually I realised the evidence for God wasn’t there; that science does a much better job of getting at reality; that if you have faith in something it makes you less able to think critically about it, et cetera, et cetera. But I realised that I couldn’t give my usual spiel in this situation. The roles we’d played for each other were too different. See, her main memory of me was the guy who sat in her house representing the LDS Church, convincing her to spend hours of her life in the service of this group. Now I was bailing, and she was still there. And something in her tone suggested to me that she was not too happy about that. Some people really seem to enjoy being Mormons; somehow she gave the opposite impression. But how would she ever pull the ejector seat? Could I now be the anti-missionary, or would that make me seem completely evil? The whole Mormon image-conscious bullshit thing was doing a number on my head once again.

A funny thing: I didn’t sugar-coat the facts about the Church being wrong, but I didn’t argue tooth and nail either. I wonder why I held back. Maybe I’m sick of being The Evangelist. Evangelism’s for fools. And she hadn’t asked for me to change her religion that day, just as she hadn’t asked me to change it all those years ago. Had I interfered enough? On the other hand, I cared about this person as we argued about religion there in the shopping centre. I regretted the monstrous waste of her time that I was directly responsible for. If I could start her on a process of fact-hunting, maybe she could eventually get free of an organisation that she didn’t enjoy promulgating. Or would that just put her at loggerheads with her Mormon (and in some cases RM) family? Was I proffering freedom, or conflict? What do you do?

What I did was this: I told her about my experience of leaving the LDS Church, and how worthwhile it’s been. I gave my reasons plainly. And when she tried turning the tables and invited me to a church activity, I did what she should have done all those years ago: I politely declined.

There was one thing I didn’t say that I wish I had. All those years ago, when she looked up to me as a spiritual example, it was because I said what I believed, and told the truth insofar as I knew it. And that’s what I’m still doing now. There was no reason for her to think less of me, or me of myself. Quite the contrary.

But ever since that chance meeting in the shopping centre, I have had this inescapable impression: that out of all the rotten, evil, terrible actions in my life (not that there are all that many), serving a mission for the Mormon Church was by far the worst thing I have ever done. Not only did I waste part of my life in furthering ignorance, I wasted other people’s lives too.

When Parowan Prophecy fails

16 December 2008 / / 2 Comments

Sure, it’s fun to see failed predictions, but you know what’s even better? Watching a very specific prediction that you know is going to fail in advance. It’s almost godlike: you get to see the certainty of the prognosticator, and you know the prediction is going to fail, but he doesn’t. Plus you get all the stages of prophecy grief — shock and anger at the lack of fulfillment, scriptural contortions and rationalisations afterward, and finally acceptance as the whole incident is (shall we say) ‘clarified’ for those who still believe.

Well, here comes just such an example now. There’s a fellow in Utah that calls himself the “Parowan Prophet”. He’s been crackpotting around for years — I remember reading about him in the 90’s — and now he’s made a splash in the news. Unfortunately, the prophet failed to predict his bandwidth needs, so yesterday his site was throwing a 509 error. Bit of a worry. Make sure to vet your prophets before trusting them with anything important, like interstate marriage legislation.

Anyway, he’s predicting that nuclear bombs will prevent Obama from taking office in January.

“I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the ‘riots’ that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn’t lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said.”

These riots, according to his prophecy, will encourage the “old, hard-line Soviet guard” to seize the moment and rain down nukes on the United States, killing at least 100 million of us.

You heard the man. Obama will not take office. Now what hermeneutical gymnastics will we see from P. P. and any true believers on January 20th? And how long will it take them to forget the prophecy was ever made? My prediction: three femtoseconds.

Forced into deception, poor things

11 December 2008 / / Comments Off on Forced into deception, poor things

This article is rather odd.

A call to give religion full voice in the public square

Because, as we all know, theocrats have had such a hard time getting any representation at all these days.


Major presidential candidates shunning evangelical Christian leader


Christians in Washington state protesting atheists putting up one sign in a public place

The article centers on the remarks of one Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a professor of religion at Princeton, which apparently is a real job.

The professor says Obama’s ode to the power of faith “as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life” reached a conclusion that actually cuts people out of public political expression or forces them to disguise their true religious motivation. Obama said,

I believe that democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal values.

Right. If you’re (say) against abortion, your religious reasons aren’t going to cut it with people who aren’t members of your church. You need to put it in (as Obama says) ‘universal values’. So what’s the problem?

Glaude said this would mean only those who argue from reason, i.e. facts or science, not from revelation, can make their case in the public square.

Oh, that we lived in such a world. People should be embarrassed to claim that the voices in your head should trump facts and science, but here is Mr Glaude unabashedly claiming exactly this.

He rejects this attempt to “tidy up” the mess of democratic conversation, saying it leads to an “unchristian result – people won’t speak the truth and will be forced to mislead to make their voices heard.”

Shorter Glaude: accept what we say without criticism or analysis — or we’ll be forced to lie to you.

Except this isn’t an un-Christian result at all. Christians routinely and habitually lie in order to get their agenda passed. Look at Proposition 8, fronted by the LDS Church, who staked the election on false and misleading claims.

[A]dvertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little explanation.

Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.

“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.

Or the deception of creationists, notably those involved in the famous Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. Judge Jones said in his decision:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

And, of course, the way Christians seem to routinely portray atheists as a pack of amoral hedonists in need of salvation instead of, well, regular people.

These examples of dishonesty aren’t anomalous. Shading the facts is necessary when the facts don’t support your deeply-held worldview. But as someone who strives for reality-based living, I resent this view that we need to treat superstitious ignorance with the same regard as science and reason. It’s insulting for Glaude to say that he shouldn’t even have to try and convince non-believers. Forced to lie? No. Forced to reason.

Education in reverse

8 November 2008 / / Comments Off on Education in reverse

Does it seem strange that a university would deny a degree to an otherwise capable student just because he’d been booted from his church? Then you’ve never been to BYU.

Chad Hardy was excommunicated for producing the edgy yet cheeky ‘Men on a Mission‘ calendar. Well, religion is religion. But now BYU has placed his communications degree on hold even though he’s fulfilled all the requirements. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. What are they trying to turn out over there? Competent professionals, or think-alike alumni that will one day donate big bucks to the alma mater? Oh. Guess I answered my own question.

In the words of the BYU official:

Your graduation application will be placed in a “hold” file and your name will not be resubmitted for graduation. If in the future you are reinstated as a member of the Church in good standing, you are invited to contact my office regarding your possible eligibility for the awarding of a degree.

For some reason, Mr Hardy’s not accepting the gentleman’s awfully decent offer. You can read about his impending legal struggles (and possibly contribute to his legal fund) at his website.

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